Saturday, February 15, 2014

Protecting the tooties from un-smooth roads

by digby

I was going to write a snarky little post about Peggy Noonan's latest, an admonition to all of us to stop being so impressed with the personalities of presidents and pay attention to the policies, but I see TPM got there first. They went through her lugubrious Reagan memoir What I Saw at the Revolution and pulled out these tasty morsels:

Reagan, whom I adored.... He was to popular politics what Henry James was to American literature: He was the master. ... He was probably the sweetest, most innocent man ever to serve in the Oval Office. ... He was never dark, never mean.... This sunny man touched so many Americans. ... Ego ties us all in knots, but not him. ... "No great men are good men," said Lord Acton, who was right, until Reagan.

I FIRST SAW HIM AS A FOOT, a highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek, perfectly shaped. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe even a little . . . frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from un-smooth roads.

That same person wrote this just this week:

[T]he Blair papers remind us that in the past quarter-century the office of the presidency has become everyone's psychotherapy. There is an emphasis on the personality, nature, character and charisma of the president. He gets into dramas. He survives them. He is working out his issues. He is avenging childhood feelings of powerlessness. He is working through his ambivalence at certain power dynamics. He will show dad.

History becomes the therapist The taxpayer winds up paying the therapist's bill.

This wouldn't be so bad—it would actually be entertaining!—if the presidency were not such a consequential role. People can lose lives when presidents work through their issues. This Endless Drama of the Charismatic President is getting old. And dangerous.